I recently finished Mark Fisher’s fantastic book The Weird and the Eerie, and in it, he cites the primary component of weird fiction as the sensation of “wrongness.” Fisher describes weird objects or entities that feel as though they should not exist, saying, “The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.” I think it’s this feeling or idea that’s genuinely unsettling. When presented with things that don’t conform to our prior conceptions, we realize the world may not work in the way that we thought it did.

This story had a long gestation period. It took me almost two years to finish, and that was after writing it, rewriting it, and then ripping it apart at the seams and writing it all over again. At its heart, I wanted to honor the character of Lucy. She’s such a wonderful presence in the book, but she’s disregarded far too early on. As a child, I remember watching Dracula films and hearing my parents talk about the book. I knew there were only two women in the story: Mina who lives, and Lucy who dies. 

I sometimes start typing without any clue where I’m going. This results in a lot of abandoned fragments, but also a lot of stories that surprise me with their destinations. This was one. Honestly, I had the not-unusual premise of a man imprisoned in a dollhouse, and considered it for all of thirty seconds reflecting not only that it was old, but also that it was damned similar to one just published in Lightspeed Magazine, “Sand Castles.” And then I thought, hey, maybe he’s a full-sized man trapped in that dollhouse, which to him will be a confining cage.

This is a retelling of a story told by a friend’s grandfather in Oaxaca, though numerous versions of it exist in Spanish-speaking America. The one I was told had two men stumbling across an abandoned baby in the night and carrying it as it grew heavier and heavier. I added a few details—the brothers’ business, the missing eyes, the gasoline—but I can take no credit for the spine-tingling moment when the baby addresses them through a mouthful of teeth (ya tengo dientes).